Field experience – from organic to biodynamic viticulture, a beneficial change
(with French and English sub-titles)
by Andreas Schumann
(Director of Weingut Odinstal – Palatinate wine region – Germany)
The change from organic to biodynamic viticulture is often a daunting one for winegrowers, whatever the size of the estate.
Andreas Schumann illustrates, through his practical and pragmatic experience on a small wine estate, that nothing is impossible as long as you go for it. Nature has proved to be his best ally along the way.
Vineyard & Biodiversity Conference #1 – Tomorrow’s viticulture starts today
12 & 13 May 2022 – Avignon (Palais des Papes)
This series of lectures, a link between science and the field, offers a genuine overview of the issues surrounding biodiversity, going well beyond both the boundaries of land registry and the strict framework of viticulture in general.
Conceived as an open, multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary dialogue dedicated to the wine-growing world, the aim is to share knowledge, highlight and pool practical and scientific experience, break down barriers and create a virtuous dynamic in which biodiversity becomes a collective goal rather than an individual mission.
©VignobleBiodiversité
©VineyardsBiodiversity
#sustainabledevelopment #viticulture #biodiversity #organic #biodynamic #organicviticulture #biodynamicviticulture #transmission #openscience
First of all, I’m mostly a farmer. I just need to get used to the technique. I’m not used to speak in front of such big audiences, as well as I’m not used to speak in English. So my English is like the English of a farmer. But I hope we’ll come along with that. My topic is to give you another view from the biodynamic perspective. I’m very happy that all the speakers before me showed a lot of very nice and detailed pictures of all the diversity, cover crops, flowers and small animals you can find. So I don’t show you these pictures again. We are farmers. Usually most of us are special wine farmers working in a monoculture. In German, farmer is translated by ,Landwirt’. The translation of ,Land’ is clear, it’s land, and ,Landwirt’ means that we are doing ,Landwirtschaft’, so it’s land-economy. It’s like using land in the most economic way you can do. And I really don’t like that. But the term ,Wirtschaft’, you can also translate it in German into Pub, like a small Pub. And that’s a translation I prefer, because we are hosts for different cultures, different crops and different animals, if we think a little bit more in terms of general in agriculture. So that that could be a nice translation. In French, you have the word agriculture. That’s much nicer I think, because we cultivate the landscape. So we farmers cultivate the landscape, we decide what it’s looking like, if it’s a monoculture or if it’s a bit more diverse. It’s our decision, as the generality of farmers of course, not only the few people here in the room. But that’s, in the same way the big task in front of us, to bring all the spirit, the motivation, the passion for biodiversity out of this room and spread the word in our communities, where we are based and make others work in this way. And don’t wait for any support from the government. Just start with it. If we just start, than we can talk about it. That’s a big rule in marketing. It’s like just do good things and talk about them. And then you can make the customer pay for it. That’s what we’ve seen in one of the presentations before. If people know that there are done some good things for biodiversity, they are willing to pay more for it. So we just need to start and talk about it. Then probably a lot of colleagues see that we can gain higher prices, then follow us and do something for biodiversity as well. That’s just a few ideas upfront. Well, first thing I want to tell you is how and when did biodynamic agriculture start. It was at Pentecost 1924. So the idea is around 100 years old. The situation was that synthetic nitrogen was developed, not because of any agricultural professor who said we need fertilizer for the crops or whatsoever. The reason to develop this synthesis of nitric was the war. The Germans, the bad Germans, invented it to win the war, because you need nitric acid to produce TNT, to produce gunpowder and so on. After the First World War, in the peace contracts of Versailles was written: No weapon production, nothing in Germany. They were not allowed to produce gunpowder, TNT and so on from the big factories that they built in that time. The synthetic nitrogen had to go somewhere, so they brought it to the fields. That made the farmers independent from animals. Before, every farm – there were no specialized farms – every farm had a herd of ruminants and animals, and they had to have some fields to feed them. They had to have some pasture where they can go. And with the manure from the animals, they could feed some other cultures, some grain, whatever. And then they put a part of the yield from the grain on the side, so they had their seeds for next year. And also the animals get more by themselves. Those farms were circles. They didn’t need any input from outside. Of course, there was nothing you could sell them. They had enough of everything. With the independence from animal based fertilization, there was the possibility to go more specialized on special cultures. So the farms got less diverse but they had higher yields, because the vigor was much higher with synthetic fertilization. And then they needed to start spraying. But the quality of those high yields was, of course, not the same than the one before. That was the time when some big farmers asked the anthroposophic guy, Rudolf Steiner, for some ideas to get back to the quality they were used to. That was the invention of biodynamic viticulture. So coming back from that history, I’m coming from Pfalz. That’s one of those landscapes that are not too steep, as Ilona told us in the morning. There is a really nice monoculture area. Pfalz is about 80 kilometers long and 3 kilometers wide. So it’s 24,000 hectares and every square meter is a grapevine, more or less. The main reason I just began with that independence from animal fertilization : you don’t need to grow food for your animals anymore, you don’t need the pasture for the animals anymore. So you can go a bit more specialized. But you still need the animal. If you were a poor farmer, you had a cow to work your cultures. If you were rich, you had a horse. But you still needed some food for them. And you still needed as well some pasture. But then you got tractors. So you were totally independent from the animals. And when everyone had a tractor, they wanted to use it and the tractor got bigger, with more horsepower. So you needed wider rows and you didn’t need all those stonewalls in between. And though viticulture is the culture where you can make the most money, so everything else was removed. And then, of course, you didn’t need all those apple trees any more, or those fields you had in between, probably with some other vegetables. Because you can buy everything in the supermarket now. So 100% monoculture, no diversity in the landscape, a big loss of all those habitats. Coming back to what I told you before: what’s the ideal of a biodynamic farm? We need – and this is a really tough task – to create a farm organism that doesn’t need any input from outside. But if you grow traditional vine varieties, it’s not possible at all, because you need to spray them. But it’s an ideal where we can work on and try to reduce everything. On a biodynamic farm, you have obligatory ruminants as the heart of the farm. But you need a good balance between animals with different orientations – that’s a bit philosophical probably – but with animals that are orientated more into the air, like chickens who are originally birds, with ruminants who are more horizontal, and you have for example porks that search their food in the ground, not above ground. So these are different orientations. And also you can work in different ways with the different manures. In the past, there was much more knowledge about this, experienced knowledge, not scientific knowledge. The people knew: if you want to give an impulse for root growing, it makes most sense to fertilize with pork manure. Then the roots grow deeper, because the pork has the impulse that breaks the root in the upper soil, so they need to go deeper. If you want to have more fruit impulse, you need cow manure. And if you have a very cool soil, you could use more horse manure for example, which has a much bigger heat impulse than the other ones. Of course, you needed to plant the food for your animals. You needed to have legumes for the fertility. That’s also a quite philosophical view, but legumes collaborate with bacteria and can condense cosmic nutrition to living nutrition. They take it from outside, the air, and just put it into material. That’s quite magic, I think. You need pasture for your animals and then, of course, forest is a part of a farm organism. It’s vines, fruit trees, whatever. Some aquaculture. And in the 7th lecture of the agricultural course, Steiner tells you all this exactly: how to organize a farm organism and to have everything in the right balance. And, which found its manifestation in the Demeter certification rules was this here: Jungle. Now, in the Demeter international certification rules, you need to dedicate 10% of all of the hectares you own to biodiversity. I think that’s the only organization that has a rule like this: to have a space – philosophical, be careful – where everything is allowed to be. Give 10% of your farm also for pests, for fungal diseases, for everything – where they are allowed to be. So they have no reason to go on your culture crops. A very philosophical idea, practice is something different mostly. But it’s an idea where you also… In our farm, we have a part of forest. Sometimes there are some ponds in it. Well, we leave just nature. We leave the fallen trees, etc. So it’s really a spot that helps a lot for the diversity. It is coming out of that spot and spreads over the whole farm. Okay. You know, I’m not a professional PowerPoint presenter. The farm, it’s Weingut Odinstal. It’s a really magical place. We are on an old basalt quarry, so we have a lot of volcanic stone. This is the house and these are the vineyards. We have the meadow around, and all the forest here belongs to the farm. That’s quite unique in our area, which is here, 3 kilometers wide, 80 kilometers long, and usually at around 200 meters altitude. Vine growing stops, and then there is forest. We are up to 350 meters altitude, surrounded by forest – like an island up there. The eruption of the volcano broke up the geology that was there before. It was a classical Trias geology in layers over each other, the sediments, sandstone, calcareous stone and then heavy clay above. And this was broken up, and made Bam. And now, we have totally different soils everywhere, where the slope direction changes a little bit. We are here directly next to the quarry. There is volcanic basalt under the vines. Of course, here it’s very poor, only like this, then there’s the rock. And down here, we have much more soil above the rock. Than we have here, east slope, the calcareous soil. And more south sloped is all the sandstone, interrupted by this plot, which has very heavy clay under it. So there is already diversity in the vineyards and in the soil. We have a lot of different structures, we have the forest, we have the vineyards, we have all the dry stonewalls like here and here, and also between the vineyards. Some of them are 3 or 4 meters high down here. And we have stripes of trees and bushes in between. So it’s very diverse. The pastures are very, very poor. This means in general, when you have poor pastures, you have high diversity. The same as in the vineyard. When the soil is very poor, you have a high diversity. When the soil is rich, you get the higher, the bigger, but in the end the natural plants that grow there is only grass, that takes up all the nutrients. That’s a big topic for me nowadays, because with all this sustainable thinking, we are talking a lot about carbon dioxide balance. And when you have low yields, because you have poor soil, then you have a problem on the carbon footprint of your single bottle wine, because yield is the biggest factor you have out in the field, to reduce your carbon footprint. Because of high yields, you can divide all the inputs you have in the vineyard through much more liters, than when you have low yields. That’s the big problem I have with all those carbon footprints – it works against quality and it also works against biodiversity. When you have those soil-nesting wild bees or soil-breeding birds, there needs to be some light on the soil. Otherwise, they would not make their buildings there. If you have a vigorous meadow or pasture, they are not there. So it’s not all about carbon footprints. We have all those different habitats in the vineyards, mainly seeded cover crops. But I come to that later, because we stopped that. But of course, there are still a lot of seeds left from last year. And this is already a nice habitat for all the insects, bees – cultured ones and wild ones of course. There are birds building their nest in the vine and so on. Then we have the dry stonewalls, where we find a lot of amphibians, lizards, grass snakes – but the grass snakes you only find when you have water somewhere. Down here in the quarry, there’s a big water reservoir, which is probably a bit too far away, and this is 140 meters deep. So the snakes from those walls don’t go down here. But next to the house, we have a plant cleaning system, because out here we have no canalization. There is a little pond where all the used water is ready to be evaporated, so there is some water around. There’s also a pond in this little forest here. We have water in the diversity of the habitats. We have mice, and a lot of weasels who eat the mice, amazing bees, etc. We have pasture, which is, as I said, very, very poor. We have a cooperation to keep some cows there. There are deer, rabbits, wild boars and insects. And if you have a poor pasture in high diversity, you find very seldom plants. And you find specialists under the insects, who can only live on those seldom plants. Some of the forest is quite wide and we let it develop like a jungle, like however it wants. But we also put some parts of the forest into a fence. It develops a totally new ecosystem there, which was there already 100 years ago, but the forest didn’t deliver enough grass to encourage people to go on with the system. But you can also use the forest as a pasture, and than you get grass under the trees. It’s very interesting to see that development. And we have the quarry with all the walls and the water, the pond of the cleaning system. So when I started there, the farm was already organic. It was in 2004 that I started. The former owners, they already converted the farm to organic viticulture before there was a certification – so I think they started end of the 1980s. The vineyards are certified organic since 1992. It was totally clear that we will go on with organic. But in 2006, we started to go biodynamic, because we changed our mind and that brought a lot of changes in the thinking. We were rethinking the production circles, as the ideal of a biodynamic farm is that you don’t need any input from outside. That’s a big basic: reduce the input from outside everywhere where it’s possible, which is, when you relate it to wine, probably the most consequent Terroir-idea you can have. Because if you have no input from outside, the taste is only from the place and not from things you add from outside – not only in the vineyard, but also in the cellar. We started to be very consequent in spontaneous fermentation, spontaneous malolactic. We just started to see the fermentation temperature as being part of the vintage character. Because when you pick the grapes very late, they come into a cellar which is much cooler then when you pick them early, or when you have an early ripening vintage. We are at 350 meters altitude – in our region we are on the border of vine growing. When I began there, people were laughing at me and said: You can’t work there, the grapes don’t get ripe up there. Just to have a connection about the climatic conditions up there. Meanwhile, we are probably the biggest winner of global warming, even if it’s a shame to be a winner of this shit. So in the cellar we decided: temperature is temperature. No intervention on the temperature, nor on the fermentation. We started to add whole bunches into our white wines, because we wanted to have tannin structure in the wines that come from our place, from our Terroir, from our farm individuality, and not from a wooden barrel, from special wood, from a special region in a special toasting. That’s not authenticity. That’s winemaking. It’s okay. When you’re a winemaker, you have an idea of how your wine should taste like. And than you need to do everything. If the sugar is too low, you chaptalize. If it’s too high, you add water. If the acidity is too high, you add carbonate. If it’s too low, you add acid. And you take away the wrong tanins and add the right tanins, and so on. You can do that. But that’s not our approach. We want to bring into the bottle a maximum of authenticity, and not a wine that appears in our head. We started composting. We started bringing animals back to the field. And for composting of course, we needed cooperation. So we now have a local cooperation with one of the last guys in our region who keeps cows. He’s one of the only guys in the region who doesn’t make wine. So he brings us a little herd of Charolais for the summer months, when we have enough grass on the fields around the vineyards. We don’t want to add any food, because then you get weaker and lose diversity on the pasture. That’s why they are only there from end of May to end of October. And then we do the sales of the meat, we slaughter the Charolais when they are around one year old. The main reason is the weight. Half an animal, slaughtered, finished, is around 100 kilogram. That’s a big portion. When they get older, it’s even more. But that’s the smallest portion we sell. If you buy meat from Odinstal, you need to work nose to tail. We don’t make an auction around the fillet and keep the bones, because nobody wants them. If a restaurant in our region wants to have meat from us, they work with the whole animal. That’s very important for us. That’s very uncommon in Germany. I’m always happy when I come to France and see a bigger selection of special things from the animal on the restaurant lists. We cooperate with a beekeeper. We integrated some chickens that go to the vineyard, mainly together with the sheep. And we put sheep in the vineyards after harvest, just grazing there and taking what is left. The animals have soul life. That’s a big difference from a plant. The next step to the animal is that they have soul. And I think it’s totally different when I look out of the window, and there’s only grass – that’s one thing. But if there is just one cow or a deer or whatever, the whole atmosphere is totally different, because of the presence of the soul of this animal. It changes completely the atmosphere when we have them. After grazing the vineyards with the sheep and before the cows come back, there are a few months without ruminants, where we have a totally different atmosphere on the farm. It’s much nicer when we have the ruminants up there. We started using the vineyards as pasture already. Said this, we fertilize with the forces – that’s the voodoo thing around biodynamic. We don’t need to go deeper into that today. Last year we planted more than 30 fruit trees. We already had some, but the important thing is that when you go more diverse, you also reach the aim to gain some money. With a few apple trees, we developed a new product a few years ago, which is like a pet-nat cider. And this is working very, very, very well. So we were searching someone who works with old varieties of apples. Now we have, I think, 30 different varieties and different rootstocks, old ones, to increase this production and also to make more habitats, more flowering offers in the early spring, and a bit more possibilities also for the bats to live. Another thing is, to work in a closer circle also made us see, which amounts of sulphur and copper can be replaced with plant-teas, that are from plants that grow around our fields: stinging nettles, horsetail, ivy, willow. So we use all that and in the same way we reduced the amount of copper and sulphur. Another thing is: we stopped turning the soil and only work with direct seeding. That’s very important for us. We also stopped mowing during the season. We never spray insecticides, because we have a very good stock of bats, of other insects that damage the other insects. So we never spray insecticides. I think it’s a big problem when you have a nice offer with a lot of flowers in every second row or in every row – all the insects are more or less like in food paradise – and you mow it down, from one day to the other, they suffer hunger. All the insect population will go totally down, especially the ones that were in the mowing machine. So we never mow during the vegetation period, only after the break of vegetation the sheep mow. And during winter, we just mow to cut the old wood a bit smaller from the vines. It’s the same on the pasture. When you use the meadow and you mow it, it’s the same. But when you graze there, you always have some flowers in between, they are not destroyed all at the same moment. So it’s very useful for the insects and wild bees, and so on. A little bit – because it’s kind of a holy thing in biodynamics – about the cow shit. This is really a magical thing. Because this really creates diversity. A lot of diversity. The dung beetles that live in here and fly out there, are a big part of what special kinds of bats eat. And there’s about 40 different dung beetles. In average, there are 50 beetles per portion of cow dung. And it’s a totally different thing when you have cow dung which is from your place, one time through the cow and then fallen off. That’s totally different than fertilizing with cow dung from another place. There’s a long story about this topic, why it’s also important if you work biodynamically and spray the preparation 500 with this – which is the horn manure -, and why it should be your own one, or at least from the region. Because there’s the special forces from the region, because the cow eats up what the region offers. You don’t need the forces from somewhere else. You need the forces from your own place. That’s very interesting. The dung from one cow feeds about 200 frogs, 25 starlings, 13 storks. That’s, I think, a really big thing for biodiversity. One portion of dung is a habitat for about 100 species and up to 4000 individuals. Diversity is not only what we see above the soil, but also what is under the soil. And we don’t do this since long with the sheep, but we realized that the soil eats up the leaves that fall down much faster, because there is a lot more activity and a lot more warmness. So the activity of the soil is much bigger when you have the dung of the ruminants. And you also have more worms, more insects. So you have the food that the next animals needs. You have more birds. And we also had less problems with the budworms in spring. Because we have more birds and they don’t focus totally on the sheep dung. They also eat by accident the worms they find on the vines. Last year in spring – because deer have very sensible noses – when you still have the smell of the sheep, and the wool still is on the wine stalks, on the wires and so on, because sometimes they feel like scratching and they go to the vine because they have no other sheep to scratch them, and that is very interesting. We also have less mice, because we have on one hand better conditions for the birds to get the mice, and on the other hand the sheep walking around, destroying the roads and the nests of the mice. So I think that’s the most I wanted to tell you. Just in between, I think we saw a lot of wild animals for biodiversity, but we didn’t see that much cultivated animals so far. However, they also create biodiversity. And that’s when you start rethinking production cycles and think about how to get back animals into the farms. This is not an animal. It’s a bee orchid which you can only find when you have very poor meadows. And we don’t want to fertilize this away. My last slide. Thanks for your attention.